Although the role of social communication in impression formation is well-recognized, the effects of the communicative process on the communicator, as opposed to the message recipient, have been relatively unexplored. The proposed research seeks to examine how variation in a communicator's message about a person as a function of different aspects of the communication situation will affect the communicator's own judgments and recollections of the person referred to in the message. Another major concern of the proposed research is to compare the immediate and delayed effects of message production on impression formation. Six studies are outlined. In all six studies undergraduates are given an essay about a target person containing a number of descriptions exemplifying different personality characteristics. After summarizing or characterizing this information for another person, subjects are asked (after different delay periods) for their own recollections and evaluations of the target person. The first two studies examine how people's use of different trait scales provided by the experimenter to report their judgments of a target person affects their recollections and evaluations of the target person over time. The third and fourth studies examine the effects of varying the audience's attitude toward the target person on the communicator's message about the target person and the communicator's impressions of the target person as a function of message intent, message formulation, and message delivery (Study 3), and as a function of different communicative functions (Study 4). The fifth and sixth studies examine the effects of varying the set of alternative persons from whom the target person must be distinguished in the message; where the set of alternative persons either requires selective distortion of ambiguous descriptions (Study 5) or requires selective deletion of polarized discriptions (Study 6) for effective communication.